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Motivated Skepticism

Edited by Vladimir_Nesov, PeerInfinity, et al. last updated 10th Mar 2012
You are viewing revision 1.13.0, last edited by Vladimir_Nesov

Motivated skepticism is the mistake of deliberately applying more skepticism to claims that you don't like, than to claims that you do like. Because emotional disposition towards a claim isn't generally evidence about its truth, including it in the process of arriving at a belief means holding the belief partly for reasons other than because it's true.

Blog posts

  • Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People by Eliezer Yudkowsky
  • Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points by Eliezer Yudkowsky

See also

  • Dangerous knowledge
  • Filtered evidence, Conservation of expected evidence
  • Motivated cognition
  • Positive bias
  • Rationalization, Oops

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